As Far As Organization Goes: We Are Platformists
As Far As Organization Goes: We Are Platformists Nicolas Phebus 2001 Contents The Dielo Trouda Group and the Platform ......................... 3 The Relevance of the Platform Today ............................ 6 2 In Quebec, and more generally in North America, anarchism and organization have notbeen coupled well. Indeed, the last serious attempt to build a political anarchist group in North America date’s back to the adventure of the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation1. However, there have been, and there still are, organized anarchists around the world. Gener- ations of activists worked hard on the question of organization, and, for those of us who don’t want to reinvent the wheel, it is useful to look at their analysis and proposals. Even if we find good things in ‘classical’ anarchists like Errico Malatesta and Michael Bakunin, we at NEFAC are mainly influenced by a tradition called, for lack of a better word, ‘platformism’. The Dielo Trouda Group and the Platform The ‘plaformist’ tradition started with the analysis of the anarchist defeat at the handsof the Bolsheviks during the civil war made by a group of Russian anarchists in exile. This group included such important figures as Nestor Makhno, one of the main leaders of the insurrectional army of the Ukrainian peasantry, Peter Arshinov, historian of the same movement and old friend of Makhno, and Ida Mett, passionate partisan and historian of the Kronstadt insurrection2. Based in Paris, the group was organized around the publication of an anarcho-communist magazine in Russian, called Dielo Trouda (Worker’s Cause), a project originally conceived of by Arshinov and Makhno while they were rotting in the czarist prison some fifteen years earlier whichwas finally founded in Paris in 1925.
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